THIS BLOG IS THE MESSAGE.

"The media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage." - Marshall McLuhan

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

It’s important to address young people in the reopening of New Orleans. In
rebuilding, let’s revisit the potential of American democracy and American
glory.

- Wynton Marsalis

I’m sure that there are reasonable people that had some
reasonable projections about the future of New Orleans, but none of those could include
not trying to rebuild the city and make it better than it was before.

- Harry Connick, Jr.

My administration is going to stand with you – and fight
alongside you – until the job is done. Until New Orleans is all the way back, all the way.

- President Barack Obama

And I wound up in New
Orleans for all those years and it was a great place,
really a catalyst creatively.

- Jimmy Buffett

- - - - -

It
was well over seven years ago that Hurricane Katrina devastated the Southern coast,
but it appears that the rebuilding process is far from over and that life
especially in Louisiana’s most populated city has not yet completely returned
to normal. With eighty-percent of the city flooded, a couple thousand confirmed
dead, billions of dollars of damage, and a subsequent diaspora of many of the
area’s native population, it may be that New Orleans will never be as it was
before. Rebuilding efforts began as soon as the storm passed, and yet more than
half a decade later, there remains widespread debate and conflict about a
variety of issues, including the inadequate response of the government to
provide the financial support the area needed, as well as disputes about how
the city should be reconstructed now. Unfortunately, for the public, the
rebuilding process has been marked by capitalist interests, which are backed by
government and state apparatuses. In this way, the city is no longer an
authentic site of the cultural commons that was created through the historical
developments of the city through influence by the public sphere. Rather, it is
now simply a place where monopoly rent can be extracted from the deliberate
construction and representation of the cultural codes of the city in order to
make a profit. New Orleans
is quickly becoming a space of corporate hyperrealism, fueled by the rhetoric
of an economic revitalization from the political and capitalist authorities
that have taken control of the structural transformation of the city, a process
that can only be combated by a revolutionary defense against capitalist urges.

In
order to see how the rebuilding of New
Orleans has been shaped by economic forces, it is
important to first examine how the city fits within the understanding of the
public sphere. In the introduction to Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas McCarthy
points out that the “liberal public sphere took shape in the specific
historical circumstances of a developing market economy” (xi). Later, Habermas
argues that any examination of the public sphere must always be “investigated
within the broad field formerly reflected in the perspective of the traditional
science of ‘politics’” (xvi). In this way, as the physical site of the public
sphere, the city has its foundation in both the economic circles of the
production of capital and the relevant political forces. Furthermore, the
“element of early capitalist commercial relations… manifested their
revolutionary power… [when] the national and territorial economies assumed
their shapes” (17). These “national and territorial economies” can be applied
to the New Orleans of the 1800s, as the
adolescent United States
gained the area with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 while the mid-1800s saw the
region become an important port city with access to the Mississippi River and
the Gulf of Mexico (The Library of Congress,
Liu et al. 264). The growth of the city resulted in the “emergence of the
diffuse public [that] formed in the course of the commercialization of cultural
production” that spurred the creation of “new social categor[ies]” (Habermas
38). As such, in ideal circumstances and application, the public sphere serves
as the “functional element in the political realm… for the self-articulation of
civil society with a state authority corresponding to its needs” (74). That is,
without the function of the public sphere, the general population loses much of
its power through numbers against the political authorities. However, “changing
political functions” can alter the public sphere through a “systematic
structural transformation,” a reconstruction that eventually can lead to a
“downfall” (142).

While
the structural transformation of the public sphere might more readily attain to
political and economic restructuring at the level of agencies and state
apparatuses, post-Katrina New Orleans
has seen its share of physical, material transformation. It is estimated that
70% of the housing units within the city’s borders were damaged by the storm
itself and subsequent flooding that occurred once the levees broke (Olshanksy
et al. 273). Furthermore, a study completed the year after Katrina by the Urban
Land Institute concluded that 45% of the housing structures had been built
before 1950 (compared with the national 21%) and thus perhaps lacked the
foundations to withstand hurricane forces (Liu et al. 265). In some
neighborhoods, such as the Lower Ninth Ward, whole streets of housing units
were washed away. As David Harvey notes in Rebel
Cities, “urban restructuring” is often in the form of “creative destruction,”
which usually affects the marginalized groups that are stifled under political
and social authorities (16). Despite the fact that the destruction of New
Orleans came from a natural source, it nevertheless remains a reality that
particular areas of the city were affected more so than others; the Lower Ninth
Ward, for example, had a high percentage of African-American homeowners and
renters who lost everything (“New Orleans”). The mistrust between various
racial groups in the South presents a “unique” problem in the reconstruction
effort, for “White families have historically had the most power and money…
[with] gracious homes built on the higher ground… [to avoid] the flooding that
plagued other residents” (Olshansky et al. 282). However, the suspicion raised
by the minority groups in New Orleans
towards any building plan supported by the elite planning groups appears to be
valid in this case. For example, Jimmy Reiss, the head of the New Orleans
Business Council, claimed that “the diaspora after Katrina created an
opportunity to build a city with fewer poor people” (Olshansky et al. 282). In
this way, it appears that White elites in New Orleans view Katrina as a
distressing, but perhaps valuable “destruction” that can be capitalized for the
“urban restructuring” of the city.

Furthermore,
Harvey argues
that the urbanization of capital implies that “capitalist class domination
[occurs] not only over state apparatuses… but also over whole populations—their
lifestyles… their cultural and political values (66). This appears to be
occurring as the various state-run and politically-driven groups that came
forward in the first couple of years after Katrina sought to propose their own
vision for the rebuilding of the city. These elite groups laid claim to the will(power)
to shape and re-shape the city by “the process of urbanization” and through the
rhetoric of economic revitalization (Harvey
5). In 2007, the issue with rebuilding intensified with the revelation that
plans to restore the city were concentrated into seventeen specific areas of
focus, ranging from the “ruined Lower Ninth Ward” to “not hard-hit… but still
in need of renewal [areas like]… the Bywater area” (Nossiter 1). It seems
obvious that the majority of funding for the rebuilding process would go to the
areas most devastated by the hurricane and to those who had lost their homes,
their belongings, and their livelihoods. Yet, then-Mayor C. Ray Nagin claimed
the development of these areas would be “driven by incentives and a
market-driven approach” (Nossiter 1). At the same time, the Mayor’s “recovery
chief” Edward J. Blakely said that the areas “all centered on the old markets,
on which the city was built in the first place.”

The
combination of a business-driven rhetoric with the pseudo-sentimental position
of rebuilding the historical areas of significance to the city manifested
themselves in various agencies and building plans, such as the Bring New
Orleans Back Commission, the Unified New Orleans Plan, and Office of Recovery
Management (Olshanksy et al. 275-7). To some extent, most of these agencies and
plans failed, or took so long to establish that they became useless. In one
significant example of the failure by one of these agencies to navigate the
process, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission (BNOBC) backed the Urban Land
Institute in suggesting the conversion of the “lowest-lying, most heavily
damaged neighborhoods to green space through government-financed buyouts of
property” (Olshanksy et al. 275). However, the ugly face of politics reared its
head, as Mayor Nagin, running for reelection, sought votes by announcing “his
intention to allow all residents to decide where to rebuild,” despite being the
very individual who created the BNOBC in the first place. In the end, neither
the BNOBC nor Nagin’s proposal ended up being much of an achievement, and the
struggle to solidified rebuilding plans continued. In fact, it was not until
the Louisiana Recovery Authority approved the New Orleans Strategic Recovery
and Redevelopment Plan and the Unified New Orleans Plan before funding was
allocated for the rebuilding effort, almost two
full years after the disaster itself (275-7). Meanwhile, the residents who
had decided to stay through the storm attempted to rebuild their homes and
businesses themselves regardless of government assistance or the support of the
elite planning agencies.

It
is thus assumed that through the rebuilding and revitalization process, New
Orleans can become the cultural center it once was, or possibly even stronger
than before. However, this assumption relies on the idea that the cultural
experience of a city can be commodified. As such, Harvey argues that it is the
economic force of capitalism that simultaneously produces and shapes localized
cultural notions while pursuing global venues of capital accumulation, and it
is this paradoxical construction that allows capitalistic endeavors to fixate
on particular spaces to “appropriate and extract surpluses” (109). Today’s
global economic circuitry provides the means to commodify and commercialize
“everything,” even the structure of the city as a whole. The drive for the
collective symbolic capital on a global level leaves “in its wake all the
localized questions about whose collective memory, whose aesthetics, and whose
benefits are to be prioritized” in any capitalist undertaking (106). In this
particular case – and perhaps, in all cases involving capitalist ambitions – it
is safe to say that it is the capitalist and state authorities who assert their
memory, their sense of aesthetics, and their benefits, all in the inexhaustible
search for profit. In the case of New Orleans, the combination of corporate
incentives, business rhetoric and a capitalistic drive to gain profits from a
land ravaged by natural forces are results from the tried-and-true strategy of
developers to “reserve the choicest and most rentable piece of land in some
development in order to extract monopoly rent from it” (102). In this strain of
argument, the commercialization of the city by capitalist forces echoes Habermas
as he saw the “transfer of public functions to private corporate bodies” as the
“progressive ‘societalization’ of the state… with an increasing
‘stateification’ of society” (142).

However,
the question arises as to how exactly modern capitalism produces and shapes
localized cultural notions in order to extract profit. To see this
manufacturing in action, one only has to consider the tourism commercials that
construct the post-Katrina New Orleans
landscape as unchanged, the culture as thriving, and the place as providing a
singular, authentic experience. The New Orleans Convention and Visitors
Bureau’s “You’re Different Here” advertising shtick seems to suggest that there
is still life and culture to be found in the city despite the widespread
devastation, even going so far as to blatantly claim the city as the “most fun
and authentic city in America, y’all!” (0:26). On the other hand, Harvey seems to paint the
“traditional city” as being always-already “killed by rampant capitalist
development, a victim of the never-ending” capitalist drive “no matter what the
social, environmental, or political consequences” (xvi). The rhetorical
strategy of the “You’re Different Here” commercial seems to posit that
everything is fine down in good ‘ole Louisiana, and that the hard-working,
folksy but resilient people of New Orleans are just waiting and willing to
provide the traveler with a one-of-a-kind experience. Nevertheless, Harvey rightly notes that
the “urban commons… are appropriated all too often not only by developers, but
by the tourist trade” as well (106). In this sense, the city resident’s “right
to the city” is supplemented in favor of the tourist’s “right to entertainment,”
and thus, the city becomes a brand to be controlled and marketed in order to
make a profit. In response, Harvey offers up the city of Barcelona as a
warning, for the “irresistible lure” of the collective symbolic capital that
came with accomplishments in architectural design presented “more and more
homogenizing multinational commodification” (105). To put a stop to the
homogenizing commodification of New
Orleans would mean that corporate interests, including
those of the tourism industry, be curtailed in favor of residential stability
and quality of life. This, however, would put the city in a financial dilemma.
A great deal of the economic stability of the region relies on tourism, and to
hinder the encouragement of travelers in seeking out the city would mean a drop
in revenue more significant than losses now.

Nevertheless,
the representation of New Orleans
in such advertising formats seems to directly position the city as somehow more authentic then ever before while
ignoring the fact that much of the city has been or will be rebuilt. After all,
it is not hard to observe how a cultural place itself can become a commodity to
be marketed, sold, and bought when accompanied by a rhetoric of “life,
heritage, [and] collective memories” that can only be found at that singular
space (Harvey 89-90). The cultural fabric undergoes what R. Altmann deems
“communification,” or the creation of the community through “publicity work”
(Habermas 201). This is precisely what the tourism commercials for New Orleans are doing:
constructing a false sense of community through the work of the media and
public relations. These commercials urge the uncertain or reserved traveler to
visit the city, but they neglect to point out that much of the city is not
there, or at least not in its original construction. Furthermore, this false
creation of community and space relates to Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco’s
ideas about simulacra and hyperreality. Baudrillard defined the art of
simulation as the Real “produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory
banks and command models—and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite
number of times” (366). In this way, every single individual who views one of
these tourism commercials and believes the hype essentially contributes to the
replication of the false identity of New
Orleans. Furthermore, in Travels in Hyperreality, Eco relates how he went from the
“recreated New Orleans of Disneyland [to]… the real city, which represents a
still intact past… that American civilization hasn’t remade, flattened,
replaced” (29). Unfortunately for Eco, this seems to be an erroneous statement
now, for New Orleans
has indeed been flattened by Katrina, remade according to capitalistic notions
of revitalization, and replaced by a simulated representation of the culture of
the city.

The
process of remaking and replacing appears to be reliant upon the collective
symbolic capital of the city, or the site’s value as a place of “authenticity,
uniqueness, and particular non-replicable qualities” (Harvey 105). However, as Harvey questions, why would anyone accept
this “Disneyfication,” where the process of rebuilding that follows particular
commodified cultural notions creates a simulated construction that supplements
the real thing? In the “New Orleans” episode of No Reservations, host Anthony Bourdain makes note of this aspect of
the rebuilding process of the city by remarking that he sees celebrity
appearances in the city as contributing to the “real peril of the
‘yuppification’ of New Orleans,” which is like “swapping Brooklyn for
Disneyland” (17:29-49). While Harvey sees the
“Disneyfication” as occurring in a wide range of cities around the globe, this
argument seems especially pertinent to the actual city of New
Orleans as Disneyland opened the
themed area of New Orleans Square
in 1966, replicating the look and feel of the city in a miniaturized,
hyperrealistic manner. For example, small plaques can be found near the
entrance of each of the shops and restaurants in New Orleans Square. These plaques are
modeled after markers that buildings in the French Quarter had to have in order
to prove they had fire insurance; a lack of a plaque meant the building would
burn to the ground. If tiny, irrelevant and largely disregarded details like
the fire insurance plaques are replicated in a place far removed from the
actual site itself, then one could plausibly argue that the New Orleans Square
of Disneyland is such a hyperrealistic simulacra of New Orleans, Louisiana that
the theme park now holds, especially in a post-Katrina world, the most
“authentic” place in which to experience “New Orleansness.” Here is a perfect
example of the “cultural commons… becom[ing] commodified… by a heritage
industry bent on Disneyfication”—quite literally, in this particular case (Harvey 72). Additionally,
in this way, the fact that New Orleans
can be essentially replicated alludes to the destruction of the value of the
place itself as an authentic and unique site.

There
is, however, some small hope for the way that New Orleans can be represented more
truthfully by the media. Specifically, consider at length the No Reservations episode of New Orleans, shot in 2008.
The episode opens up with shots of the devastated city, expansive reaches of
city blocks that are devoid of buildings, cars, and people. No voiced
commentary accompanies the first gloomy forty-five seconds. The lack of
Bourdain’s overtly sarcastic and profanity-laded observations seems strangely
divergent from other episodes in the travel series, and yet, the silence is
entirely appropriate. In this way, he presents the city in a more accurate
context. Two minutes into the episode, Bourdain notes that New Orleans (of 2008) is “not all better;
it’s not recovered or bounced back, or any other chamber of commerce
platitudes” (2:10). Following his eagerness to portray the local flavor of the
city, Bourdain focuses the interviews, commentary, and locales he visits on the
residents and laborers who choose to stay, rebuild, and attempt to carry on
with their lives. In this manner, it can be argued that the New Orleans of No Reservations speaks against the
commodification of the city, as it shows the reality (or, at least, some
version of “reality”) of the difficult rebuilding process on a local,
residential level. On the other hand, Bourdain does end the episode with a
pointed address to the camera, asking the viewer why they have yet to come
“here” (43:30). The show is, after all, a travel show, and it would be
inaccurate to suggest that Bourdain is not selling a specific angle to each
city he visits. However, it remains that the New Orleans
that is presented (or represented) by No
Reservations and Bourdain stands in stark contrast to the New Orleans of the “You’re Different Here”
approach.

Nevertheless,
even with a more pragmatic outlook to the rebuilding process of New Orleans comes the sad
realization that the public influence of any city remains mediated through a
“pseudo-public or sham-private world of cultural consumption” rather than a
logical, realistic approach to the continuation of city life (Habermas 160). It
remains certain that as long as profit can be extracted from valued spaces, no
matter the level of simulation, hyperrealism, or construction, capitalism will
continue to seek the structural transformation of the city. After all, it seems
difficult, perhaps impossible, for the everyday individual to face “political
power… [that] seeks to reorganize urban infrastructures and urban life with an
eye to the control of restive populations” (Harvey 117). In this way, the “right to the
city is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who gets to fill it with
meaning” (xv). Examining the physical rebuilding of New Orleans and the
political strategies used to limit the public’s involvement suggests that it is
the corporate and political entities, supported by state authorities and
apparatuses, that are filling the “New” New Orleans with their own
consumption-driven, capitalist meaning. Tim Oakes echoes this in “Tourism and
the Modern Subject” when he notes that:

representations of space are
necessarily ideological, and are mobilized in the service of power, for they conceive
an idealized space in which the needs of capital, of the state, and other forms
of social power, are met… the power of place is found in its insistence on
grounding the flows of people, capital, information and other media in a
precise location. (1)

In this way, the space of New Orleans is being
rebuilt along the lines of the dominant ideological and political discourses.
What outright power or authority does the public have against corporate
entities, backed by state apparatuses with monetary interest in the
commodification of the city? It remains that perhaps the only way to stop the
relentless capitalistic drive is through a “revolutionary” perspective of the
public’s “right to the city.”

In
the concluding chapter of Rebel Cities,
Harvey aligns
his thinking towards a more classical Marxist approach to anti-capitalist
struggles, in that he calls for those affected by capitalism to band together
in order to fight the oppression. He sees the “association between people and
places [as] extremely important as the source of common bonds,” and this seems
to directly speak to the rebuilding process of New Orleans (146). It is the “laborers [who]
are engaged in producing and reproducing the city [that] have a collective
right… [to] what kind of urbanism” the city should produce (137). It is the
“neighborhood spaces” that embody “profound cultural ties based… in ethnicity,
religion, and cultural histories and collective memories” (133). It would take,
then, the whole of the city’s inhabitants, across the whole range of social,
racial and class-based divisions, to rise up against the political and
corporate apparatuses that have taken the reins in the redevelopment process.
This would mean rising up against the “competitive urban entrepreneurialism”
that results from “city administrations us[ing] a wide variety of incentives to
attract (in other words, subsidize) investment” (141). If Harvey is to be
believed, and the “traditional centrality of the city has [already] been
destroyed,” then it is up to the social forces of influence that the public
sphere holds to dictate the new meaning of the city (xvii). Harvey argues that in order for civilians to
assert their right to the city, they must “claim some kind of shaping power
over the process of urbanization, over the ways in which [the city is] made and
remade” (5).

Unfortunately,
this level of revolutionary change seems unlikely to happen, at least in New Orleans. The long
history of mistrust between the racial groups coupled with the diaspora caused
by the damage to particular neighborhoods has resulted in a drastic change in
the diversity and cultural make-up of the city. Furthermore, divisions between
the races and classes in the area make it difficult for the public to come
together as one body to fight the commodification and restructuring of the
city. In light of these issues, it seems appropriate that Harvey ends the
chapter on “The Creation of the Urban Commons” with the idea that:

the
dismantling of the regulatory frameworks… that sought, however inadequately, to
curb the penchant for predatory practices of accumulation has unleashed the après moi le déluge logic of unbridled
accumulation and financial speculation that has now turned into a veritable
flood of creative destruction, including that wrought through capitalist urbanization.
(86)

It is the imagery of the deluge,
the tidal wave of oppressive capitalist forces that seeks, especially in the
case of post-Katrina New Orleans,
to wash away all the cultural ties to how the city once stood in favor of
profit, commodification, and homogenization. Following along with this line of
thinking, Harvey
elaborates to some length on the destruction of a city’s authenticity that
accompanies the re-branding process by the tourism industry. At the same time,
he singles out the city of Porto
Alegre as “actively constructing new cultural forms
and new definitions of authenticity, originality, and tradition” in light of
the community effort to resist globalization and multinational capitalism
(111). How exactly Porto Alegre manages to
assemble and identify its own cultural commons is not necessarily important to
how New Orleans
would (or should) construct its own meaning. All that remains clear is that
there is no going back to the Old New Orleans and the pre-Katrina cultural
commons. What is left is the realization that what is being constructed in the
rebuilding process is the New New Orleans, a place that must be defined and
defended aggressively by the public, who must come together as one in order to
rebuild, for themselves, an image of the city in their own eyes. Or else, they
must stand back and let the deluge of capital, the rising tide of
commodification, and the tempest of profit overtake the city.

Habermas, Jürgen. The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence. Trans. Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1991. Print.

Harvey, David. Rebel
Cities From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. London: Verso, 2012. Print.

Noisster, Adam. “New
Orleans Proposes to Invest in 17 Areas.” The New York Times 30 March 2007. Web.
10 December 2012.

Oakes, Tim. “Tourism and the Modern Subject: Placing the
Encounter Between Tourist and Other.” Seductions
of Place. Eds. C. Cartier and A. Lew. London
and New York:
Routledge, 2005. Web. 10 December 2012.

Olshansky, Robert B., et al. “Planning for the Rebuilding of
New Orleans.” Journal of the American Planning Association
74.3 (2008): 273-287. Academic Search
Elite. Web. 10 December 2012.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

In light of the recent discussions as posed in class, I feel
that it is the right time in the semester to transition from straight, academic
prose and offer up some sort of self-reflection. While I acknowledge that this
blog is meant to focus my studies of the Politics of Information, as addressed
by the perimeters of the class, I would like to briefly suspend that in favor
of an informal response to the question “why am I in grad school?”

Last week in class, we were transitioning from Harvey’s Rebel Cities to Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory and the topic
quickly turned to the reasoning behind attending an institution of higher
learning, especially given that higher degrees no longer (if they did at all) guarantee
a job placement after school. I must confess that I did not participate in the
class discussion as much as I normally do because of the topic at hand. I do
not really know why I choose to undertake a Masters degree, especially one in
English. My undergrad is in Creative Writing, and I had all but decided to
pursue the Rhetoric and Composition option at the grad level, but now I’m
unsure. This all comes down to the fact that I do not want to teach. While most
my classmates and friends in the department have reservations about teaching,
for the most part they understand and acknowledge that teaching in any capacity
most often comes with a degree in English. I guess the problem really comes
down to exactly what I want to do for a professional career, and how a Creative
Writing and Rhetoric & Composition background will help me.

Aronowitz states that “education is successful when the
student identifies with social and cultural authorities” (1). But I have to question
if this is really what I’m undertaking by pursuing a higher degree. I choose
English because I’ve always been interested in reading, literature, and
writing, and I choose Rhetoric and Composition because – truthfully – I did not
want to do the Creative Writing or the Literature option. Furthermore, theory
both excites and intimidates me, as I said in the first post to this blog at
the beginning of the semester. But now, having almost finished my first
semester in grad school, I have to wonder if I’m really gaining anything from
it. I confess I do not like the idea of being forced to identity with “social
and cultural authorities.” I like to think that I am gaining something more
than just base cultural information and a place in the social and economic structure
of the world. Or rather, I hope that
at the end of all of this – school, academic life, everything – that I will
gain something worthwhile to me.

Friday, November 9, 2012

The school is the last expenditure upon which America should
be willing to economize.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt

True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your
high school class is running the country.

- Kurt Vonnegut

In the introduction to Digital
Capitalism, Dan Schiller questions the idea of the “utopian vision” of the
Internet, inquiring if that the digitalization of the “express[ion of] ancient
yearnings” is equivalent, or at least indicative of, “the historical
detoxification through scientific knowledge: the truth—information?—will make
us free” (xiii). Despite the vast amounts of information that is available free
on the Internet (although that’s not to say all of it is “true” or reliable –
Wikipedia being a prime example), the majority of learners in this country
remain enrolled in the traditional routes of education, although it does seem
that each passing year brings more and more attention for alternative modes of
schooling. Anyone who has seen advertising and/or commercials promoting the
entirely of the education experience being conducted online, from the comfort
of the student’s own home (you don’t even have to change out of your pajamas!),
seems to be enough to make any student who is tired of dealing with long
commutes, absurd parking situations and lengthy, tedious lectures held in
stuffy classes turn immediately to online schooling. However nice or easy that
sounds, we must continue to remember that “cyberspace itself is being rapidly
colonized by the familiar workings of market system” (Schiller xiv). In this
way, caution is heeded in light of the education system being further
commodified from the condition it is already in.

The university is a business, and it must continue to make
profits in order to keep itself afloat. But what happens when education becomes
(more-or-less) freely accessible, affordable and tailored to an individual’s
own learning habits?

Amada Ripley raises this question in a recent article in
TIME. In “College is Dead. Long Live College!” Ripley visited both
“brick-and-mortar colleges and enrolled in half a dozen MOOCS,” or “massive
open online courses,” in order to experience how each operates (it appears she
focused primarily on classes, both traditional and online, that dealt with
physics and/or science) (37). Although there still remains in academic circles
a stigma of online courses (I personally know a handful of professor who are
reluctant or refusing to teach their courses online) being somehow inferior to
traditional courses, MOOCs like Udacity, Coursea and edX have some pretty
legitimate support, ranging from a former Stanford professor to Princeton, Penn
and Duke to MIT and Harvard, respectively.

Ripley’s experience seems positive for the most part, as she
notes that the introductory physics class she enrolled in at Udacity was
“designed according to how the brain actually learn” (37). She notes that
former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrum, the CEO and co-founder of Udacity,
saw that traditional Stanford students enrolled in his online course did better
than those who didn’t take the Udacity course. Thrum relates on how he was able
to adjust the course based on reactions from students, including how when “tens
of thousands of students all got the same quiz problem wrong, he realized that
the question was not clear, and he changed it” (39). Perhaps this is to the
benefit of the students and the coursework, having large numbers of
quantitative data that can be turned into qualitative changes. On the other
hand, one of my own professors recently revealed to the class that she changed
the final exam of the graduate theory course she has taught for the past
ten-plus years after she saw that students were too stressed with a take-home
exam. Arguably, she did not have, despite teaching for so long, the “tens of
thousands” of students to give her the feedback that Thrum did. My professor
couldn’t make changes on the fly, or even from semester-to-semester, as easily as Thrum could with a wider scope
of participants and thoroughly electronic means.

Furthermore, Ripley calls attention to the fact that
according to research, “three semester of college education have a ‘barely
noticeable’ impact on critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills”
(36-37). This relates to a topic of discussion this week in class, in which one
of my classmates brought up the criticism leveled against mandating general
education units, especially at the undergraduate level. His criticism, it
seemed, stems from frustration he experienced at not really gaining anything productive
or useful from the wide range of supplemental classes he had to take in topics
he wasn’t really interested in. However, I offered up my viewpoint, in which I
noted that I made sure to take general ed classes in topics I was interested in
(for example, an astronomy course in life in the universe and the possibility
of aliens). In fact, I didn’t decide on my undergraduate major until taking a
general ed class – Creative Writing 1. It’s not clear if the “three semesters”
that Ripley cites is primarily from the first couple of years of school (which
are themselves heady, uncertain times for most students living on their own for
the first time) but the issues my classmate raised perhaps find some legitimacy
in Ripley’s article. However, MOOCs could arguably one day be widespread and
developed enough to allow students to pick from a wider range of topics than
that which his provided in a traditional university setting.More classes like the one I took in astronomy
(which was, ironically, provided at Santa
Monica Community College,
often cited as the destination community college for both in-state and foreign
exchange students as it has an extraordinarily high transfer rate to 4-year
schools like UCLA and USC). In that course, we discussed possibility of alien
life in the universe. We looked at the criteria that exoplanets needed in order
to provide life (within the hospitable zone to a central star, the major
elements, etc), read Sagan’s Contact
as a required text and studied the various probes sent out over the years, as
well as looking at more traditional astronomical topics like formation of
stars, planets and our solar system. I was interested in the class because of
its specific focus while still retaining a lot of the more “useful” components
of a science/astronomy class. I was thankful that SMCC provided general ed
courses that stepped outside the normal offerings of generic science classes.
However, this isn’t practical in light of severely limited funding for
universities and thus online courses might be a step in the direction of
offering a wider range of courses for cheaper.

There is also something to be said about Ripley’s
acknowledge of the fact that a lot of MOOCs, Udacity in particular, “aim to cut
out the middleman [or the transferring of credits to higher-learning
institutions] and go straight to employers” (41). She does note that at this
stage, most of the MOOCs and other alternative learning routes “work well for
students who are self-motivated and already fairly well educated,” but this could
certainly change if the prices, time commitment, and end benefit of the MOOCs
could be further applicable to students’ needs, or at least more so than in
traditional channels (41).

Additionally, we must consider the implications of the University of Phoenix, a for-profit school owned by
the Apollo Group, closing 115 facilities around the country:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1ylZKk5IDc

(YouTube video not embeddable).

The reporter rightly notices the university heeding the
changing times by looking for “a new business model to stay competitive”
(1:28). Perhaps then, the closing of the brick-and-mortar facilities is their
way to try to stay in line with the development of online learning tools. On
the other hand, Ripley cites a quote by University of Phoenix spokesman Ryan Rauzon,
who says that “[students] need a degree, and that isn’t going to change anytime
soon,” and points out that a vast majority of companies still look for “traditional”
degrees and it will be some time before the wide acceptance of online or MOOC
provided degrees (40). The contradictions between what the University of Phoenix
says and what it does seems to signal some sort of interstitial occupation between
the “traditional” and “new” routes of education.

However, in the end, I have to wonder if all this talk about
diversifying the education process (that is, even further than it is already
divided) through online application is somehow reminiscent of “leading consumer
products companies like Disney and General Motors [having]… ‘two-tier marking’
plans, polarizing products and sales pitches to reach ‘two different Americas’
– rich and poor” (Schiller 53). Obviously, there are already extensive
differences between the experiences and education students have at, say, the
Ivy League colleges versus the state-run universities. That is not to say,
however, that I essentially believe my experienced and education at California
State University, Northridge is somehow inferior
to one I would have gotten if I had attended, for example, USC or Berkley, nor
am I suggesting that I think I’m not getting something worthwhile out of both
my B.A (Creative Writing) and M.A. (Rhetoric and Composition) at CSUN. I am
simply acknowledging the fact that one school is considered “inferior” to the
others listed above, and unless something extraordinary occurs, those divisions
will remain in place. In my view, it seems that online schools, MOOCS, and
other digital avenues of learning (YouTube videos, web series, etc.) are
emerging as the middle-ground in between the “superior” and “inferior” division
of traditional schools.

What Schiller seems most concerned with – and an issue I
would have to agree with him on – is the fact that “during the 1970s… the
long-standing distinction between education and business began to erode,” and
it certainly has only escalated since then (147). Schiller sees the causes of
this as relating to matters of in-house corporate training and education, changing
information technologies and more adults returning to the academy. The “information
technologies” aspect is most interesting to me, since he later takes issue with
the “central selling point of most [online course production] software packages
[being] that faculty members can ‘simply fill in the blanks, and the program
produces a Web site’” (193). When I first began at CSUN two years ago, I had
never heard of Moodle. Now, I use it everyday, and cannot think of a class I’ve
taken during my undergraduate studies that did not use Moodle in some way. I
consider this site, as helpful as it is sometimes, one of those “fill-in-the-blank”
academic tools, one that disengages the student from the classroom instead of
creating a worthwhile experience. This is one reason why I prefer the method I’m
undertaking this very instant: the act of blogging. (Full disclosure: this is
the third class I’ve taken with this particular professor, and a quick view of
my profile will show the other blog sites I’ve made for other courses.)

In addition to outlining many instances of corporate
education programs, Schiller also notes that the Apollo Group planned “an
aggressive expansion” in Asian and European markets, turning the idea of the “mega-university”
into a “broker of distance learning services on a world stage” (198). My primarily
issue with this idea, one that Schiller seems to share, is that blending education
and business, especially one primarily geared towards English/America education
models, is only spreading capitalism and not necessarily the ideals of
knowledge and truth. Ripley notices too the interest that venture capitalist
have shown towards the “business model” of MOOCs (37). However, unlike
Schiller, she does not spend too much time looking at this potential problem,
noting only that it “seems likely that more people will eventually learn more
for less money. Finally” (37). Ripley appears to remain optimistic about the
future of education in light of technological and economic changes, while
Schiller advocates caution in proceeding through the intersection of education and
business.

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

It is inevitable that each time a new product
is released into the market, it supplements, improves on, or (in the most
extreme cases) completely replaces an existing commodity, rendering what has
come before it obsolete. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the realm of
technology, where advances in hardware seem to come as often as the weather
changes. In light of this process, Best Buy’s Buy Back Program, in which
consumers “buy it now [and Best Buy will] buy it back when the new thing comes
out,” attempts to capitalize on consumers’ constantly shifting desires for new
commodities. However, by focusing on the commodities themselves and the service
role that the company takes in facilitating transactions, the commercial
effectively ignores the ways in which modes of labor are shifting and the
implications of an entirely information/service-driven economy should
traditional labor be displaced by technology.

In
order to advertise the Buy Back Program, the commercial directly appeals to
consumers’ feelings of frustration and distress over the constant cycle of
newly-released products. The first five seconds of the advert exaggerates
(perhaps rightly so) the notion of the rapid pace of technological innovation
that renders “everything else… obsolete” (0:04). Additionally, the text cards
proclaiming “Technology moves fast” (0:08) and “We feel your pain” (0:15)
showcase a (perhaps spurious) sense of understanding and sympathy towards the
consumer’s plight. It is only in the last five seconds that the commercial
makes any note of the company or program itself. That is to say, almost the entirety
of the traditional thirty-second commercial is focused on appealing to the viewer’s
reservations about technology and consumption. The rhetoric here seems to be
that it is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, to desire the new “thing”,
whatever it may be, and the Buy Back Program is a route that enables the consumer
to literally “buy into” the incessant demand for novelty, and, as a result, the
continuation of the consumption process essential to the capitalist system.

The
incessant cycling between the old and the new is a major factor in what
Morris-Suzuki calls the “perpetual innovation economy,” one that “pour[s]
increasing amounts of capital and labor into the development of better
software, new techniques, different products” (18). In light of contemporary
application, this statement may seem problematic as in the past fifteen years, “labor”,
as a productive, human activity in the Marxist sense of the word, is being
increasingly and systematically replaced by automation and robotics technology.
However, Morris-Suzuki does go on to note that “many jobs – particularly jobs
involving personal services – continue to be relatively unmechanized” (24).
This outlook more closely fits with the shift from “productive” to
“non-productive” jobs, or what Mandel sees as the division between “manual and
intellectual labor” (21). A Best Buy employee fits into the category of the
“non-productive” or “service” labor because he/she is not responsible directly
for creating or producing the commodities, but rather acts as the middle ground
between the various technological companies and the consumer(s). In this vein,
the commercial for the Buy Back Program works to situate the corporation as an
important component of the “perpetual innovation economy,” and vital to the
continuation of the capitalist system. According to the commercial, it appears
that without the Buy Back Program, consumers would be left with their obsolete,
and thus ostensibly useless, technology.

Nevertheless,
it must not be forgotten that the “exchange of the ability to work (that is,
labor power) for wages, and wages for necessities” is actually at the core of
the capitalist system (Davis,
et al. 7). Without human labor to generate surplus value for the various
commodities, profits decline. Hirshl argues that the vast, continuous cycles of
technological innovation are “a catalyst for revolutionary change,” the sort of
social change Marx called for (158). Thus, the “cyclic process… [that]
increases unemployment, heightens realization crises, and thereby sets the
competitive conditions encouraging another round of technological adoption” actually
signals the “end” of capitalism, rather than it being an important facet to
continuing the economic structure (164). With technology getting smaller, more
precise, and increasingly sophisticated with each generation, as it is show in
the Best Buy commercial, it is not hard to imagine fully automated production
processes devoid of human labor. In a perhaps slightly less apocalyptic or
revolutionary attitude than Hirshl, Jones also rejects technological advances
as somehow creating a new or sustainable form of capitalism. Jones’s view takes
into account the idea that “information jobs are themselves highly susceptible
to labor displacement,” meaning that as technology renders productive jobs
obsolete, service and information workers will be affected as well (qtd. in
Hirshl 160). That is to say, as technology displaces human labor at the level
of “‘local’ system dynamics [it will] generate ‘emergent’ or ‘global’ dynamics”
(162). Without productive labor, regardless of the site of production (domestic
or foreign), the information/service worker would be out of a job.

In
the end, Best Buy, and subsequently its Buy Back Program, can only exist if
commodities are made with surplus value. Hirshl raises an important issue when
he questions what sort of jobs will be available in “information capitalism” as
“electronics technology replaces labor” (160). Despite Best Buy’s optimistic
stance on the “perpetual innovation economy” and its role in that system, the
future of the capitalist system as Marx outlined remains uncertain as
technology continues to displace human labor in favor of automation. Therefore,
it may not matter where the jobs will be in an “information capitalism,” as there
may not be jobs (at least in the traditional, capitalist sense) to begin with.

Monday, October 15, 2012

“The perpetual motion was to produce work inexhaustibly
without corresponding consumption, that is to say, out of nothing. Work,
however is money.”

- Hermann von Helmhotlz

During Mostafa and I’s presentation last week on Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism
and Social Revolution, edited by Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael
Stack, I posed a question to the class in hopes to eliciting a conversation about
how technology fits within the capitalist structure. The full outline of our
presentation can be found at eng654.blogspot.com. In the entry for “Chapter 3:
Why Machines Cannot Create Value; or, Marx’s Theory of Machines” by C. George
Caffentzis, we posted a video published
by RSAnimate titled the “Crises of Capitalism” which is a remediation, of
sorts, of a lecture given by economist David Harvey.

In the video, from 7:30 to 9:05, Harvey seems to suggest that it is “financial
ingenuity” that has driven the course of capitalism. I presented this video in
class, with specific attention given to that minute and a half, because Harvey says that the “the
whole history of capitalism has been about financial innovation.” I saw this
standing in a little bit of a contrast to some of the previous texts we’ve read
in class, namely of such theorists like Daniel Bell and Manuel Castells, as
read via the Theories of the Information
Society by Frank Webster. Bell and Castells argue that the vast quantity of
bits of information form together to create a new society, as compared to such
previous eras like the Agricultural or Industrial Ages.

In an attempt to blend Caffentzis and Harvey with Bell and Castells, I asked in class whether it was
significant that Harvey
fails to mention technological and informational shifts in society in his
critique of capitalism. If we notice the gaps in his critique, then is it
possible to say that for Harvey,
technological innovation – such as robots, automation, etc. – is just another
form of the “financial innovation” that has shaped capitalism, instead of it
being a separate component? Unfortunately, I don’t think I posed the question
as correctly as I could, nor did I follow up by trying to tease out the
underlying reasons for my questioning.

So I thought I’d do that here, after this neat comic I found, of course:

In my thinking, this relates to
the debate between what Webster deems as those “proclaim[ing] a new sort of
society that has emerged from the old” versus “writers who place emphasis on continuities”
(7). It would seem to me that Harvey
fails to mention how he sees technology as shaping capitalism because he does
not see technology as anything that is worth standing by itself. As such, all the
components of technology that Tessa Morris-Suzuki and Caffentzis see as not
adding any value to the production process – specifically, robots and
automation – are, in Harvey’s view, just another factor in how the capitalists
have altered the economic structure(s) of the world. In the video, Harvey only takes issue
specifically with how “financial innovation” has “the effect of empowering the
financiers.” I see Harvey
as including technological innovation as just another category or element that
the capitalist employs in order to keep atop of the hierarchical relationship
between him and the working masses (or as Marx saw them, the proletariats).

Additionally, I see Harvey’s line
of thinking as relating to Caffentzis argument that despite the notion that “the
working day would be so reduced by mechanization that our existential problem
would be… how to fill our leisure time” (29), automation, robots and “mechanizationhas lead to an increase, not a decrease, of work” [author’s
emphasis] (31). An increase in work means an increase in the exploitation of
worker from the capitalist’s viewpoint, which ultimately leads to an increase
in value, ostensibly in a perfect application of the process. Replacement of
workers by robots does nothing to add value to commodities despite the application of automation allowing the capitalist to
manufacture commodities faster, cheaper and in greater numbers. According to
Marx, the real source of value lies in the exploitation of the worker’s
labor-power, and because robots have no labor-power to exploit, they cannot
create value. This whole argument seems to fall in line with Morris-Suzuki’s use
of Ernest Mandel’s theory that “total automation of all productive activity
(including services) is incompatible with capitalism. We cannot even be certain
that it would be compatible with human society of any kind” (15).

Of course, this brings us back to Harvey’s idea of “financial
innovation.” If the increasing use of automation and technology in the capitalist
structure is not the defining feature
in contemporary economic circles (like it might initially be perceived as
being), does this mean that robots are just another instrument in the capitalist’s toolbox, rather than a complete and separate
workspace? This would mean, of course, that every innovation, be it
technological or industrial, a new machine, robotic being or way of operating,
are only parts of the grand scheme of the capitalist to own and control the
vast economic spheres.

Sunday, October 7, 2012

It always thrills me when what I’m studying in one class
merges over to another class.

With that in mind, in her essay “Writing”, Barbara Johnson makes
the case that what Derrida saw wrong with the logocentristic nature of Western
philosophy – the privileging of speech over writing resulting from the
hierarchical notion of binary relationships – was that “even when a text tries to privilege speech as immediacy,
it cannot completely eliminate the fact that speech, like writing, is based on
a differance… between signifier and
signified inherent in the sign. Speakers do not beam meanings directly from one
mind to another. Immediacy is an illusion” (343). I think it’s interesting that
Johnson uses the word immediacy, because the first thing I thought to connect
it to was Bolter and Grusin’s notion of remediation, in which immediacy and
hypermediacy play against each other as old media is adapted, updated and used
to create new media. If Johnson is saying that speech operates under the notion
of immediacy – that it is, it is “presence, life, and identity” – then the act
of writing, of creating a text, takes on ideas of hypermediacy, of “deferment,
absence, death, and difference” (343). Meaning that when we read words on the
page, at some conscious level we are constantly acknowledging that we are using
a tangible object in order to gain insight, knowledge, entertainment, etc., but
that this relationship is effectively hypermediated in that we can never see
past the words on the page to see something inherently sustainable underneath.
All we see are signifiers, never the truth.

Furthermore, I thought briefly to connect this to Habermas’s
idea of the public sphere, in which the act of physically meeting in a place –
a coffeehouse, a salon, etc. – changed how information was circulated. Habermas
suggests that because of the rise in publication materials such as newspapers,
magazines and journals, more of the population – that is, white, land-owning
males – became involved in political and social discussions. In this way, they
were influenced primarily by texts, by the written word, by physical objects. But
Habermas saw the actual meeting, the physical act of coming together, as the
most important facet of how the public sphere was shaped. Due to this
interpretation, it seems that Habermas was, to some extent, favoring speech
over writing.